Site Mobile Navigation

Victory for Obama Over Military Lobby

When the Obama administration proposed canceling a host of expensive weapons systems last spring, some of the military industry’s allies in Congress assumed, as they had in the past, that they would have the final say.

But as the president signed a $680 billion military policy bill on Wednesday, it was clear that he had succeeded in paring back nearly all of the programs and setting a tone of greater restraint than the Pentagon had seen in many years.

Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that push next year, when the midterm elections are likely to make Congress more resistant to further cuts and job losses.

White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Wednesday that the plan was to threaten a veto over a prominent program — in this case, the F-22 fighter jet — “to show we were willing to expend political capital and could win on something that people thought we could not.”

Once the Senate voted in July to stop buying F-22s, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, that success “reverberated down” to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs.

Mr. Emanuel said the strategy emerged when the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, told Mr. Obama they needed to “shake up sacred cows and be seen as taking on fights.”

Military analysts said Mr. Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, also aimed at the most bloated programs. And Senator John McCain of Arizona, the former Republican presidential candidate, who has criticized the Pentagon’s cost overruns, provided Mr. Obama with political cover to make the cuts without being seen as soft on the military.

“They probably get an ‘A’ from the standpoint of their success on their major initiatives,” said Fred Downey, a former Senate aide who is now vice president for national security at the Aerospace Industries Association. “They probably got all of them but one or maybe two, and that’s an extraordinarily high score.”

Photo

President Obama signed the national defense authorization act for fiscal 2010 on Wednesday.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

Still, Mr. Obama said at Wednesday’s signing ceremony, there is “more waste we need to cut.”

The act authorizes $550 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget in fiscal 2010 and $130 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That compares to a total of $654 billion for both accounts in fiscal 2009.

The measure also includes a ban on hate crimes that Democratic leaders attached to the bill.

Mr. Obama has said that he does not intend to reduce military spending while the nation is engaged in two wars. But Mr. Gates also wants to cut more futuristic programs to free money for simpler systems like helicopters and unmanned spy planes that can help the troops now.

Winslow T. Wheeler, a military analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington analytical organization, said another key to Mr. Gates’s success was regaining control of the budget from the armed services.

But the administration has had to make some compromises, and some issues remain to be decided in a separate spending bill.

Mr. Obama had wanted to cancel an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a new plane that is expected to be a mainstay for the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines. He had also threatened to veto the military bills if they took money from plane purchases to keep developing that engine.

But Congressional leaders say they believe that the second engine will provide crucial insurance for the $300 billion fighter program. And they say they will take money from other parts of the military budget to save it.

Mr. Obama has also threatened to veto any attempts to salvage an early version of a new presidential helicopter that the administration canceled. The policy bill that he signed Wednesday does not contain any money for it. But the House version of the spending bill does, and that issue remains to be resolved.

Still, even White House officials say they were surprised at how far they got in reshaping the weapons programs.

“In terms of sort of bringing fiscal responsibility to Washington and changing the way the place works, you couldn’t have picked a more challenging area than the defense budget,” said Rob Nabors, the deputy director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

A New Boeing Plant

The Boeing Company said Wednesday that it would open a second assembly line for its long-delayed 787 jetliner in North Charleston, S.C., expanding beyond its longtime manufacturing base in Washington State.

Boeing, based in Chicago, already operates a factory in North Charleston that makes 787 parts and owns a 50 percent stake in another plant there that also makes sections of the plane.

A version of this article appears in print on October 29, 2009, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Victory for Obama Over Military Lobby. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe